The Button-Back Nurturers

THE BUTTON-BACK NURTURERS …. debt-ridden emotions and emotion-ridden debts – Oscar Wilde on the Irish Mothers and matriarchs, you toy the gutted room Where sensibility is decaffeinated lace Tireless in your role of martyr and your zoom Lens to condemnation before an act takes place, Your constant servitude serving only gloom Creating recognition of what we all must face, Death itself, never exhausted, a loom On which your tapestry is woven, mace Broken with your unbroken shadow. Love’s vroom Never gets off the ground or into the race And is absent save for endless debt, a womb Of ever-diminishing returns, and the plain case That you can’t own others, is yours alone to ponder, In your violated abyss with its pain and rage and wonder.